Watch a CI run while it runs

A trace that arrives after the build is a report. A trace that arrives while the build runs is a window. @vzn/vx-otel sends as it goes, so the slow task shows up in Grafana or Honeycomb while you can still do something about it.

flowchart LR
  S[run starts] -->|log| C[(OTLP collector)]
  A[task A ends] -->|span, metrics, output tail| C
  B[task B ends] -->|span, metrics, output tail| C
  E[run ends] -->|run span, stage spans, run metrics| C
  C --> D[dashboard, live]
  style D stroke:#c6f84e,stroke-width:2px

Turn it on

Declare the plugin and point the standard OTel variables at a collector. Live export is the default.

vx.workspace.ts

import { defineWorkspace } from '@vzn/vx/config'
import { otel } from '@vzn/vx-otel'

export default defineWorkspace({ plugins: [otel()] })

$ OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4318 vx run build test --all

With no endpoint set, the plugin exports nothing, so it is safe to declare everywhere.

What arrives, and when

• When the run starts, and when each task starts, a log record (vx.run.start, vx.task.start) linked to the trace.
• When a task ends, its span, its metrics and the tail of its output.
• While a task runs, its process samples as they are taken.
• When the run ends, the vx.run span, the stage spans and the run’s metrics.

Every record names the run, the host, the commit, the repository and, on CI, the pipeline and the pull request. A chart opens the trace, and a span opens its output.

It never holds a task

A task’s end only queues its records. Sends are batched: at most one per second, one in flight at a time, each taking everything that ended meanwhile. A refused send warns once per signal, and the build goes on. On 60 tasks against a local collector, live export burned the same CPU as one send at the end: 815 ms both, median of 10 runs.

To send everything at the end instead, use otel({ live: false }). Why telemetry can never fail a build is its own story: Observability that cannot break a run. The full attribute list is in the vx-otel README.